The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
The Internet is transitioning from using Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) packets and addressing. An original design goal of IPv6 was to create a network addressing scheme which would allow allocation of millions of individual IPv6 addresses to every network user. To accomplish this goal, addresses were given a size and structure which allows allocation of network prefixes to network users. The size of an allocated prefix may vary, but a single subscriber's home will be assigned a prefix which grants, at a minimum, 264 unique IPv6 addresses to each home. During this transition phase, Internet carriers will be performing protocol translation between IPv4 and IPv6, to allow new and older systems to communicate.